Debian Weekly News - October 5th, 2004

Welcome to this year's 39th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the
Debian community. Robert Millan reported
that GNOME basically works on
kfreebsd-gnu. The AGNULA Team has released version 1.2.0 of DeMuDi using the Debian installer and supporting
Custom Debian Distributions. Santiago Garcia Mantinan noticed
that current Debian CDs don't provide the required files to start the
installer from within DOS.

Debian-Installer Testing Candidate 2. Joey Hess announced the testing candidate 2 alias pre-release-candidate 2 (rc2) of
the debian-installer has been
released, with lots of fun new features. In only one week, the installer
people want to start the release process for rc2 itself. Christian Perrier
additionally announced a string freeze on October 6th.

Status of the non-US Archive. Andreas Barth investigated the non-US archive and discovered that it does only contain
two valid packages: one for main and one in non-free. While vtun will be uploaded into the main
archive, PGP 5i cannot and
somebody is willing to maintain it
as well.

Dropping real 80386 Support? Andres Salomon reported
that the Debian kernel team is considering to drop support for real 80386
machines because the i486 emulation patch is unmaintained and said to be insecure. Current versions of GCC
generate i486 code so for a real i386 the kernel emulation is required.
Debian sarge cannot be installed on such a machine due to the memory
requirements, but older releases can and be upgraded after their
installation.

Release Policy Updates? Andreas Barth, who recently became
a release assistant, discussed
whether recommends to packages out of main are permitted for packages in main.
Since some package managers handle recommends similar to dependencies this is
bound to break. He noted that packages in sarge have to be buildable in
sarge, since otherwise security support won't work. He also asked if it is ok
for a package in main to provide binary packages in main and contrib.

DebConf5 Preparations. Lars Wirzenius put
together minutes from the recent IRC meeting to prepare the upcoming Debian Conference in Finland, taking place
from Friday, July 1 through Monday, July 18, 2005. The first week is meant
for working on various issues, the middle weekend for social stuff, and the
second week is meant for talks. Andreas Schuldei announced the possibility of sponsorship for the trip.

State of the graphical Installer. Martin 'Joey' Schulze asked
about the status of the graphical frontend to
the installer, Michael Cardenas
once started. Colin Watson listed
several issues he is working on and reported that most of his time in Oldenburg was spent doing
this. Bart Cornelis added
that a Spanish company called Tuxum were in the process of changing their
installer (GPL) to be a Qt frontend for the Debian installer.

Debian GNU/Hurd K7 CDs released. Philip Charles announced the seventh iteration of the K-series Debian GNU/Hurd CDs.
He said that the main feature of the K7 set is its quality. The main addition
over previous CDs packages is XFree86 4.3. The installation instructions for the
Debian GNU/Hurd CDs are located here.

Missing Package Conflicts. Frank Lichtenheld reported
about 42 packages that lack a conflict definition but contain the same file as
a different package without replacing it. This usually renders either package
uninstallable when the other one is already installed. Petter Reinholdtsen suggested
to use the popularity contest database
to decide upon popularity which files should be renamed to resolve such a
conflict.

Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure
that you update your systems if you have any of these packages installed.

Debian Packages introduced last Week. Every day, a
different Debian package is featured from the testing
distribution. If you know about an obscure package you think others should
also know about, send it to Andrew Sweger.
Debian package a day introduced the following packages last week.

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